Occasionally, the Apocalypse Series has attempted to read the tea leaves and make predictions about the new model. I don’t believe–as other media prophets seem to–that there will be no more Big Media. Human history suggests that power tends to consolidate, break down and then consolidate again. I believe that the new consolidators of power will be organizations who can mix and match. It will be the people who can take the nichification that the web brings and use it to deepen rather than to flatten what we know.

Firstly, there will be places like Google, who reproduce news written elsewhere and use it to aggregate and distill data. Secondly, there will be places like Yahoo! and a.o.l. who are able to create or buy networks of niche websites that combine to present a reasonably full picture of the news. And thirdly, there will be places like the BBC, Reuters, and Bloomberg who can use an array of broadcast and text platforms to cover the same story from multiple sides.

Some Post employees–Dan Gross is the best example–learned to produce content for multiple platforms, to find a scoop and then make a judgment about format and what niche will showcase it best. [No surprise then that Gross is moving to niche-aggregator Yahoo!] But this practice was never institutionalized. If thought of as the business blog of the Washington Post, The Big Money might have been a useful analytical complement to the paper’s more objective coverage. If thought of as the weekly magazine of the Washington Post, Newsweek’s shift towards opinion and ideas would also have worked. But when presented as standalone news offerings, neither project made sense. Which is why–despite the intelligence of many, many of writers and editors–they fell flat.

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